[jstx]

"If you think that drugs should be legal, convince your fellow citizens to vote to make them legal."

The burden of enlightening someone should never fall upon anyone but that someone. To argue that avoiding imprisonment isn't a burden would be the definition of sophism.

[FireBeyond]

To claim that people who are actively hiding their identities, deny, destroy evidence, pass blame, abrogate responsibility - and make sometimes millions of dollars tax-free by doing so are just revolutionaries for the progression and advancement of our society is ... disingenuous at best.

[CyberDildonics]

No one has claimed they are 'just' revolutionaries. The founders of the US wanted to stop paying as much in tax. In the process they set up the most decentralized system of their time.

[dragonwriter]

The level of taxation was not a central concern of the founders, nor was the US system any more decentralized than, say, the Holy Roman Empire.

[CyberDildonics]

States rights, separation of justice, executive, and legislative branch, equal senators per state, congress numbers by population, no central bank, right to bear arms, jury of your peers...

These are all decentralization of power. The Roman empire had an emperor.

[dragonwriter]

The Holy Roman Empire is a different institution than the Roman Empire; it had an official with the title "emporer" but it also featured rather extreme decentralization of power. And it existed at the same time as the early US. In some respects, it was the direct model for the decentralization in the US system.

Also, "no central bank" wasn't domething that made the US decentralized compared to other contemporary systems. First, because central banks were extremely rare at the time, and second because the central banks of the time, and most modern ones, are a means of transferring power out of the government to private capitalists, so they further decentralize government power.

Neither was retaining the British jury system.